By Donal on Tue, 08/09/2011 - 10:01pm | Arts & Entertainment
A few weekends ago, I watched Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) again. I first watched it circa 1982, and enjoyed it so much that I brought a different girl to see it a week later. I rented it on VHS for one girlfriend, and then another, to see. Several years ago I bought the DVD to show my wife, and I probably watch it about once a year.
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'.
The recent skirmishes all dance around the central issue: the United States is in the midst of the world’s largest debt crisis. The Treasury now owes the public almost $10 trillion, including $4.5 trillion to foreigners — and that doesn’t include what households and companies owe. For decades to come, Americans will face the core problem of every heavily indebted nation: who will bear the burden of adjustment?
If you want to know how not to handle a debt crisis, look at 18th-century France.
Every time Louis XIV, Louis XV, or Louis XVI fought a war, spending went way up, forcing the government to borrow. After the war, interest payments consumed most of the government budget, and the debt only continued to grow.
Well, Top Gear's Jeremy 'Petrol-head' Clarkson and the production folks at the BBC's Top Gear television program have gotten themselves into another "sticky wicket."
First they smash a Reva G-Wiz electric car into a crash test barrier at speeds the vehicles wasn't designed for. "There, you see, they aren't safe."
THIS (gated, sorry) was the most amazing thing I read today. It's a couple of weeks old, but bear with me here. It comes from a post by Judson Phillips, the Tennessee lawyer who heads Tea Party Nation, a far-right pressure group, objecting to prospective defence cuts proposed by the administration, which he refers to as "the Party of Treason". Rather than downsizing from 11 to 9 carrier task forces, Mr Phillips says, we should be building even more aircraft carriers:
In what seems like a bid to definitively cement the perceptions of progressives disappointed in Obama, psychologist Drew Westen, a student of the alleged power of stories to shape political perception, has put together his own master narrative about Obama -- a merciless tale of presidential FAIL. It's a quadruple-length op-ed (over 3000 words) on the front page of The New York Times' Sunday Review section -- a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland.
Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for 'disrupting' a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:
The single most interesting point about today’s “debt ceiling” debate is that over the 10-year forecast horizon that frames for the entire discussion, there is simply no fiscal problem by any conventional definition. In 2021, the US will likely have a small primary surplus at the federal level – meaning that the budget, before interest payments, will no longer be in deficit.
Stieg Larsson is the best-known novelist of the past decade, his Millennium Trilogy read by tens of millions of people worldwide. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two successors are beloved for their thrilling plots and compelling title character. But Larsson also embedded in his novels the abiding cause of his life: His crusade against the far-right movements that he saw as the scourge of Scandinavia and a threat to modern European society. Yet this part of his message never quite got through.
An activist who disrupted a Bush administration auction for the oil and gas industry by bidding $1.8m (£1.1m) he did not have for the right to drill in remote areas of Utah is due to be sentenced on Tuesday.
As Bidder No 70, Tim DeChristopher put in bogus bids and won drilling rights to 14 parcels of land at the auction, seen at the time as a last scramble by the Bush administration to open up wilderness lands to oil and gas extraction.
By Donal on Mon, 07/25/2011 - 1:18pm | Arts & Entertainment
Vimeo is so different than YouTube. I found these two on Neatorama. The first one is a tribute to an easy to guess person, and rather dark. The second is strictly for laughs.
I have commented before that Malthus didn't actually predict a Malthusian Catastrophe. In his An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, he argued that rather than being freed to live in utopian conditions, the human population would continue to be resource-limited in bad times, self-limited in good times and that misery would result if these limits weren't effective enough. But even my high school biology textbook told me that Malthus had incorrectly predicted that we were doomed to run out of food.
